


Birds of a Feather

by gin_eater



Series: Interstate Love Songs [4]
Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Explicit Language, F/M, Further Emotional Incompetence, Mild Hurt/Comfort, Seasickness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-29
Updated: 2019-08-29
Packaged: 2020-09-29 13:51:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,065
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20437097
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gin_eater/pseuds/gin_eater
Summary: In which Ashe and McCree extend a bovine metaphor on their way across the Atlantic.





	Birds of a Feather

_Where she walks, no flowers bloom_  
_He's the one I see right through_  
_She's the abscess on my lip_  
_The splinter in my fingertip_

_But who could do without you?_  
_And who could do without you?_

  
"I'm sorry to leave you like this, and so soon. But we both knew it wasn't ever gonna be a forever thing. ...Aw, come on, now... Don't look at me like that. Not a day'll go by that I don't think of you. And there won't be any other girls while I'm gone, you have my word. I won't even look, if it's not a picture of you."

McCree cocked a brow from where he leaned against the door jamb. "You about done?" he asked.

Ashe shot him a glare over her shoulder, then returned her attention to the faithful love she was leaving behind.

"I'll see you soon, Caterina," she told the hovercycle, giving its headlight an affectionate pat. "You, too, Margaret. Then we'll do somethin' about that godawful ugly paint job your Uncle Jesse saw fit to inflict upon you."

"Hey, now--"

"Forgive him," said Ashe. "He knows not what he does."

The he in question rolled his eyes, and spat a stray tobacco leaf off his tongue.

Ashe sighed, then turned and strode from the storage unit with such an air of bullet-biting firmness of purpose that Jesse found himself chewing hard at the tip of his cigar to keep from laughing -- not that his ridicule stopped him from casting his own surreptitious wink at the pair of bikes before he dropped the door, but what Ashe didn't see couldn't hurt him.

It was one of the contradictory aspects of her nature that he found equally exasperating and disarming: "waste not, want not" had never been an oft-used phrase in her privileged vocabulary, but she clung like hell to and took care of the things she truly loved.

Had winter not been a stone's throw away, they would have taken the bikes with them. Weather that felt only slightly chilly standing still could dip well below freezing at ninety miles an hour, especially with any kind of humidity in the air, and Jesse had a bone-deep dislike of the cold -- as did Ashe, for that matter, although she'd let her teeth chatter through her tongue before admitting that even the combination of his serape bundled up around her shoulders and the insulating coveralls she'd picked up in Jefferson City weren't adequate to the task of compensating for almost forty years' acclimatization to the arid kiln of the American Southwest. Where they were headed, too, promised to be more fridge than oven in the coming months.

"So," she said as they made their way to the front of the facility, "Paris."

"Paris," Jesse confirmed. "Got us a couple spots on a container ship bound for Marseille outta Morehead. You don't get seasick, do you?"

"Not so far. Why don't we just take a jet? Be a hell of a lot faster."

"We're not on a time crunch just yet. I know you got money to burn, princess, but the less we're on anyone's radar, the better."

"Don't call me that. Anyway, you think I don't know how to go incognito?"

"Not incognito enough. There's a difference between avoiding detection and bribin' your way out of it."

"Right," she deadpanned, "I forgot I was talkin' to Mister Covert Ops. Had you confused for a minute with that other Clint Eastwood cosplayer publicly branded a menace to law-abiding societies worldwide."

"Well, we are a dime a dozen, so I can see how you might make that mistake."

"Uh-huh."

"Smartass."

"Keep givin' him shit, honey," the elderly woman at the front desk advised without bothering to look up from her outdoorsman's catalogue. Her name was Millie, and she herself had been giving Jesse affectionate shit for nigh on a decade now, ever since he'd run interference with Blackwatch on behalf of her and her boy during a raid on a handful of the facility's units leased by persons notorious for having their fingers in all manner of smuggling pies. "He gets cocky if he goes too long without."

"Don't I know it," said Ashe. "I'd like to buy him for what he's worth and sell him for what he thinks he'll bring."

Millie's left eye rolled up independently of the right one, revealing itself to be a bionic implant that quite literally scanned Ashe from head to toe in a thin shaft of red light.

"I like this one, Jesse. Where'd you find her?"

"Sittin' in a handbasket postmarked from Hell. --Ow."

Jesse rubbed at his arm, and Ashe flashed the old woman a smile worthy of a county fair harvest queen.

"Texas, ma'am," she said.

"That right? Y'all known each other long?"

"A while. Off and on."

"Seems to be the only way Jesse knows anybody: off and on."

They both side-eyed him simultaneously, and the hair on the back of his neck stood on end.

He cleared his throat. "Yeah, well… We gotta get goin'."

Ashe tilted her head. "I thought you said we aren't on a time crunch just yet?"

"It's gettin' crunchier by the second." He rounded the desk and leaned over to drop a kiss on the old lady's cheek, and she handed him a key fob, po-faced. "Thanks, Mill. I owe you one."

"You _owe_ me about a hundred."

"And you know I'm good for every one."

"Mhm."

"Tell Junior the truck'll be waiting at the north end of the docks."

"Take care of yourself," she told him, then nodded at Ashe. "Don't let him let you do all the heavy lifting."

Ashe smirked, and respectfully tipped her hat. "Ma'am."

* * *

He could feel her eyes on him as he buckled his seatbelt, like red-hot coals burning twin holes through his already battered hat.

"What?" he finally asked.

Ashe raised an immaculate eyebrow, and he remembered, for no particular reason, once having witnessed her apply two perfect liquid liner wings in the side mirror of his old truck as they'd rattled down a pocked and pitted dirt road.

"_This one?_" she repeated.

"Oh, and I suppose you've been a fuckin' nun the past twenty years?"

"Didn't say that."

Jesse knocked on the back window. "You ready, B.O.B.?"

B.O.B., seated in the flatbed, spun his head around and gave a thumbs up, and they started for the facility's barbed wire-topped gates and the eastbound North Carolina interstate beyond them.

"So," Ashe said after a minute, "among those other ones… Anybody serious?"

He glanced at her out of the corner of his eye, gauging the sincerity of her nonchalance. "Not really," he cautiously confessed. "Wasn't ever in the market for more than a good time or two. ...How 'bout you?"

Ashe shook her head. "Never really found the time. I did date a DA for a few months a couple years ago."

Jesse's head whipped around so hard he nearly swerved off the road.

"Hold up," he said. "I don't know which one of our crazies is showin', but it sounded like you said you dated a goddamn _district attorney?_"

Ashe shrugged. "We met at a charity gala over at White Ridge Casino. He asked me to blow on his dice at the craps table, since I was, and I quote, 'lucky enough to always avoid prosecution;' I told him it was more technique than luck, and offered to show him how I twist my wrist just so when makin' the throw." The gesture she performed with her right hand was one Jesse recognized intimately, and he wasn't surprised the poor sap had taken the bait. "--He's dead now," Ashe added as an afterthought.

He didn't have to ask why or how or who had been responsible for that. "All right, but when you say 'date,' you mean…"

"I mean _date._ You know, all the shit we never did: drinks, dinner, the occasional amusing pastime…"

"We did those things."

"Not formally."

"Why, because I wasn't wearin' a tux whenever we stole a bottle of Beam and split a plate of nachos?"

"No, because you never asked. A crime spree ain't a courtship just because we fucked between heists."

"Be fair, now -- we fucked during heists, too."

"They still weren't dates."

"Whatever. You know, you never asked me out, either."

Another shrug. "I didn't wanna date you."

"Why not? What was wrong with me?"

"Nothin' was _wrong_ with you; I just didn't see the point. What we had was-- It was fine the way it was, was all."

"Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?"

"Why slaughter the cow when you don't know how to dress it for meat? Waste of a good cow."

"You think it would have slaughtered us to be more than what we were?"

"Already damn near slaughtered me when we weren't anymore."

She'd said it to the window, and so quietly that Jesse wondered, for a moment, if he'd heard it at all, or if his ears were playing tricks on him.

He knew which it was when he reached for her hand and she reached into her jacket pocket at the same time, leaving him holding the gear selector instead.

Aw, hell.

"You shouldn't smoke in here," he said, when she rolled down her window partway and made to light up.

"Why not?"

"Ain't your truck."

Ashe sparked her lighter anyway. "They can send me the cleaning bill."

Jesse snatched the cigarette from between her lips and tossed it out the window.

"What the fuck, McCree?" she demanded.

"It ain't your truck, I said. You can't just throw money at people when you ruin their shit and call it respectin' their property, that's not how it works."

"Don't talk to me like I'm a fuckin' child!"

"Don't act like a spoiled fuckin' brat and I won't have to!"

"Jesus fucking... Pull over."

"No."

"What am I, your goddamn prisoner now? _Pull over, _McCree!"

"Why?"

"Because I want a fuckin' cigarette, that's why."

Jesse guided the truck to the shoulder of the road, and Ashe jumped out before he'd even put it in park, slamming the door behind her and stomping a little ways down the litter-strewn drainage ditch that ran parallel with the highway, where she sat back on her heels in a sulk.

Jesse watched her over B.O.B.'s shoulder in the rearview mirror.

"Guess that's that for the honeymoon phase," he muttered to himself, although he was surprised they'd made it this long -- a little over a fortnight -- without a fight.

He got out of the truck and settled back against the door to wait her out, lighting a fresh cigar.

B.O.B. looked curiously back and forth between them.

"Ain't nothin', big guy," Jesse assured him. "You know how she gets."

The Omnic's eyes narrowed.

Jesse shook his head. "Uh-uh. She's a grown-ass woman, she knows damn well how to behave."

B.O.B. was having none of it. He added folded arms and a tilt of his head to his expression, and Jesse recognized it as the same expectant glower the butler gave Ashe whenever he caught her in a fib. He'd have been tapping his foot, too, if he wasn't sitting down, because he knew just as well as Jesse did that Ashe's sudden downshift in mood had shit all to do with a stupid fucking cigarette: the culprit was what had led up to it, that whiff of vulnerability that had made her defenses go haywire, like a jackrabbit at the rustle of a snake in the brush. For someone so adept at strategizing, her brain had a remarkably basic fight-or-fuck response to feeling emotionally compromised; she'd simply fallen back on the one best suited to the current situation.

B.O.B. pointedly hitched his chin in Ashe's direction, and Jesse sighed.

"Yeah, I know," he relented, and went over to crack down beside her a few feet away on the slope of the ditch.

She didn't acknowledge him, but her eyes tracked his shadow on the grass. Jesse gave it a minute, letting her know through his silence that he hadn't come over to keep picking at the scab.

"You know," he said, gently casual, when he saw her shoulders relax a hair, "I've been referred to as a beefcake before, but never beef cattle."

Ashe chuffed a breath through her nose. "Nobody's called you a beefcake," she mumbled.

Jesse smiled. "Excuse the hell outta you? I'll have you know that the world-renowned genius and humanitarian Doctor Angela Ziegler referred to me as such on the twenty-fourth of August, 2061."

"Was she drunk, blind, or some combination thereof? And you know it's pathetic that you can recall the date, right?"

"She was neither, and it is not."

"Spoken like a man who believes what's written on his belt buckle." A beat. "You fuck her?"

"Now, darlin', you know a gentleman can't betray a lady's confidence."

Ashe rolled her eyes. "That's a no."

"You know, for someone who's been enthusiastically fuckin' me for goin' on three weeks now, you're mighty disparaging of the idea that any other woman would want to."

"I'm disparaging of the idea that a world-renowned humanitarian genius would want to. I may have no love for Overwatch, but even I know Mercy's way too good for your honkytonk badonkadonk."

Jesse chuckled. "Honkytonk badonkadonk. Okay. The implication being that you're down here on my loathsome dumbass level?"

"I think it's been well established that my judgement is questionable at best when it comes to you."

"It's the badonk. Many have tried, but none have been able to resist its singular allure."

Ashe's lips pursed in her trying-not-to smile, and Jesse knew the storm had passed. She took a final drag of her cigarette and stubbed it out in an abandoned anthill, and he got to his feet and offered her his hand.

"Giddy up, little girl. We got a boat to catch."

Ashe let him pull her up, and Jesse kissed her, once, just to verify that she would him kiss back, before they made their way back to the truck and the satisfied-looking B.O.B. in the flatbed.

* * *

"You should've let me charter that jet."

Jesse pulled his head out of the toilet just long enough to scowl at her before his stomach spasmed and he retched again.

Ashe grimaced and rubbed his back. They were two days and half a different sort of storm into their week-long transatlantic voyage, and Jesse had been hugging the commode in the tiny bathroom of their cramped little cabin since the first roll of the ship on the choppy waves.

Finally, he relaxed, and after a few cautious moments he flushed the toilet and sat back against the wall, eyes closed as he caught his breath.

Ashe handed him a bottle of water, and he rinsed his mouth out before taking a couple of small sips.

"This why you wanted to make sure I didn't get seasick," she asked, "so I could hold back your hair while you did?"

"I don't, usually. Least not like this."

A worried frown creased Ashe's brow. "You sure that's all it is?"

"Well, if it's a stomach bug, eat up while you can, because we'll probably be tradin' places in a day or two."

She felt his forehead and cheeks with her palm and the backs of her fingers.

"You're clammy, but not feverish. Come on, let's get you into bed."

She helped him lurch to his feet, steadying him when he swayed. They made it one whole step from the door before Jesse went stock-still, then shook his head.

"Nope," he said, and spun back around and bent double, heaving up the little bit of water he'd managed to get down.

Ashe sighed, one hand going to the top of her head.

"All right. I'm gonna go see if they got some ginger ale or somethin' in the mess. Try not to outside your insides while I'm gone."

He waved her off without turning around.

Ashe walked with the pitch of the ship, pinballing down the paneled hallway until she reached the laundry room, where B.O.B. was tending to the shirt that had been an unfortunate casualty of Jesse's cantankerous digestive tract. She poked her head in to tell him where she was headed, and asked that he make sure the stove-up fool hollering for Earl in their cabin didn't concuss himself on the sink in the meanwhile.

The ship's dining area was two decks above the passenger cabins, and contained two round tables, a dozen chairs, and a small buffet, the contents of which were rotated out thrice a day at mealtimes. A narrow kitchen shot off to the right at the entrance, where the cook could usually be found, scrambling eggs or cranking open a huge can of whatever sodium-drowned, vaguely botanical misfortune happened to be masquerading as the vegetable of the day.

He was nowhere to be seen, though, and with no one to ask, Ashe started rummaging through cupboards at random, looking for a rogue box of saltines or oyster crackers or whatever else looked dry and bland and liable to stay down.

"Can I help you find something?" a warmly accented voice asked from behind her, and Ashe whirled around to find a handsome dark-skinned man of about her own age, dressed in an orange hoodie and a pair of black BDUs that had both seen better days.

"Maybe," she said. "My, uh… My friend is sick, from the storm. I'm lookin' for anything that might help with that."

"Ahh," said the man, popping open a nearby locker marked with a faded and peeling red cross decal. "Food can cure a great many ailments," he explained, his fingers scanning the boxes, "but not that specific one." Selecting two, he handed them over. "Promethazine and pseudophedrine. If your friend can sleep, give them the promethazine; if they want to stay awake, give them both, and the pseudophedrine should offset the drowsiness. And make sure they drink plenty of water, especially if they've been vomiting. Dehydration will only worsen their symptoms."

"Much obliged," said Ashe. "Are you a crew member? Don't think I've seen you at meals."

"_Non._ Just a passenger who likes to keep to himself and help pretty ladies help their friends." He winked and shrugged, reminding her of Jesse, amiable and benignly flirtatious, and Ashe wasn't sure if that put her at ease or on guard.

"What's your name, then, lonesome dove?" she asked.

"Jacques," he said after a moment, as if he'd had to pluck the right one from a mixed assortment.

_Sure it is,_ Ashe thought to herself, holding out a hand for him to shake. His grip was rock-steady, and on the friendly side of firm.

"Carley," she told him. "Thanks for the assist. Maybe I'll see you around again, once the storm's passed."

"Perhaps," Jacques said, in a not-disagreeable tone that still made Ashe doubt very much that she would.

Tablets in hand, she returned to her and Jesse's cabin, where she was relieved to see that he'd finally made it to the bed, at least.

He was a truly pathetic sight, pale and sweaty, curled up on his side with one hand covering his face, and the expression beneath it screwed up with misery.

"He awake?" she asked B.O.B., who had bunched himself up against the small, low dresser built into the opposite wall.

"Not by choice," Jesse mumbled from the bed.

B.O.B. shrugged sympathetically, and shuffled from the room at Ashe's nod.

She popped a couple of the promethazines from their blister pack and sat down just above Jesse's knees on the edge of the bed.

"Come on, baby, sit up a sec," she coaxed, rubbing his shoulder when he groaned in protest at the thought of further movement. "Come on, now."

He did as requested, slowly, and Ashe dropped the meds into his hand after a moment of making sure that the change in orientation wasn't going to send him bolting for the bathroom again.

"S'this?" he asked, squinting down at the little white pills in his palm.

"Motion sickness stuff. Guy in the mess said it would help."

Jesse tossed them back and chased them with a sip from the water bottle standing sentry on the floor at the head of the bed, and then lay down again.

Ashe pulled off her boots and clambered over him to play big spoon, wrapping one arm around his chest and giving his prosthetic hand a squeeze when he laced its fingers through hers (he preferred to sleep without it, she'd learned, but the absence of its weight only made him feel even more off-kilter, and so on it stayed, for now).

Several minutes passed, and she thought he'd dropped off -- was about to follow him down, herself -- when he slurred, "I wanna slaughter a cow with you."

Ashe blinked. "You wanna what now?"

"Our cow," he explained, or thought he did, anyway. "We ain't milk. We're…" He groped for what she could only guess was the appropriate term. "Beefcake," he decided. "Wanna date the shit outta you."

Oh.

Ashe let out a slow breath, and pressed her forehead to the spot between his shoulder blades, shutting her eyes until the sudden sting behind them subsided.

"You're delirious," she said softly. "Go to sleep."

"Ain't," he argued, but the word was little more than a gruff sigh that, after a few seconds, faded into a gentle snore.

Ashe stared at the back of his neck for a long time, his tanned skin graduating down into the familiar freckled landscape of his upper back, where the sun hit him hardest on shirtless summer days.

He had scars now, too -- not just the notches and divots typical of a young ruffian, but real ones: the sunken starburst of a gunshot wound that must have at least nicked his liver; the contractured ripple of a bad burn on one calf; a textured swathe that looked like road rash covering his ribs on his right side; at least a dozen hypertrophied slashes, thick and red, scattered from his collarbones to his feet, courtesy of blades or shrapnel, Ashe didn't yet know. The only thing she'd ever asked about was the absence his left arm, some five years ago when they'd run across each other in White Sands, and all he'd done was make some stupid crack about finally having gotten around to getting his tattoo removed.

She'd gotten snot-slinging drunk over it that night, a few hours after they'd parted ways again. She'd thought it might have meant something -- other than his laziness over the matter -- that he'd kept the physical reminder of what they'd made together despite the danger it posed him if the gang ever got hold of him again, and knowing that it hadn't been his choice to lose it hadn't lessened the hurt that that part of him was gone for good, severed like an unsightly bruise cut out of a piece of fruit.

Now, with the insignia's twin on her own left arm pressed up against Jesse's solar plexus, Ashe felt almost silly to have ever put so much stock in something so superficial. She'd staked her whole life on the tenet that a family, a real family, was one built on choices, not blood, and here she was, not a month into their choosing each other again, wondering if there didn't exist something more indelible than either of those things. But if "dating" wasn't the right word for what they'd had, and even "family" sounded too flat an appellation anymore, then what was left? What could catch a person on a hook unattached to any kind of line? What kind of tattoo left a stain even after the skin was gone?

"Stupid," Ashe murmured, and pressed her lips to Jesse's shoulder, and burrowed closer against his back before letting the rhythm of his breathing and the ship rock her to sleep.

_She's__ the sea I'm sinkin' in_  
_He's the ink under my skin_  
_Sometimes I can't tell where I am_  
_Where I leave off and he begins_

_But who could do without you?_  
_And who could do without you?_  
The Civil Wars, «Birds of a Feather»


End file.
